thoughts on audience & site

initial thoughts: i am about to begin a new task which focuses on audience and site. in thinking about audience and site, the idea of immersive experience comes to mind and also some conflicting thoughts on this type of work and exhibition. i recently saw Olafur Eliasson’s ‘in real life’ exhibition in Tate Modern. i think i am drawn to immersive work because it seems relevant to many of the ideas i explore in relation to landscape – landscape as a holistic and bodily experience. immersive work moves beyond visual experience towards a more holistic, sensual and bodily experience (i acknowledge that visual experience is bodily and holistic also). yet at the same time, i often feel that experiencing immersive work feels like entertainment as opposed to engagement – make it fun, different and full of surprises – do is see entertainment less valuable than engagement? not necessarily mutually exclusive either. this definitely came to mind when i saw Pipolitti Rist’s retrospective in Sydney, where large crowds waited for beds to watch projections on and took selfies throughout – myself included. this exhibition also brought up other questions about representation. Rist’s projections of birds, skies and plant life in water etc were mediated – a representation of these experiences rather than the real, actual and existing (i also accept that the projected representation is a real, actual and existing experience) … ‘All that was once directly lived has become mere representation’ Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’ comes to mind.